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Imagine combining meditation science with time-tested nutritional, breathing and relaxation techniques. Dr. Susan Taylor did. Today, the growing popularity of yoga has offered many people a glimpse into the benefits of meditation. Yet, while yoga is traditionally intended as a preparation for deeper meditative experiences, yoga classes often only address the physical aspects of the practice.

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Advanced meditators occasionally report experiences of timelessness, or states of awareness that seem to transcend the usual boundaries of the subjective present. This study investigates this awareness in eight experienced meditators and eight matched controls by measuring 32 channels of EEG before, during, and after exposure to unpredictable light and sound stimuli.

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With its increasing popularity, many people in Western societies express an interest and motivation to meditate. However, for many it can often be quite difficult to maintain a disciplined and or regular practice, for various reasons, ranging from a lack of time to general laziness. It is possible that machine assisted programs such as neurofeedback may help individuals develop their meditation practice more rapidly. Methods such as neurofeedback incorporate real-time feedback of electro-encephalography (EEG) activity to teach self-regulation, and may be potentially used as an aid for meditation.

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When Azim's only son was murdered, he found that his practice of meditation had given him the compassion and grace to practice forgiveness. Azim offers this meditation as a way to cultivate forgiveness, as it is through forgiveness that we can create a culture of peace.

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When Azim's only son was murdered, he found that his practice of meditation had given him the compassion and grace to practice forgiveness. Azim offers this meditation as a way to cultivate forgiveness, as it is through forgiveness that we can create a culture of peace.

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This discussion focuses on some of the fruits of "contemplative science," and the implications of this body of meditation research for contemplative practice. It also explores how this area of research has come to gain increasing respectability within the scientific community, and address the question of whether contemplative science may serve as a skillful means for making meditation practice more approachable for a greater number of people in modern western culture.

Roger Walsh discusses how the meeting of meditative and Western psychological disciplines holds major theoretical and practical implications for each, as well as the promise of mutual enrichment and potential integrations. If handled skillfully, this meeting may enable them to become partners in one of the greatest of human quests—the exploration, understanding, healing, and enhancement of the human mind.

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Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity

By establishing a dialogue in which the meditative practices of Buddhism and Christianity speak to the theories of modern philosophy and science, B. Alan Wallace reveals the theoretical similarities underlying these disparate disciplines and their unified approach to making sense of the objective world.

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Meditation, Yoga, and Consciousness

IONS Board Member Lee Lipsenthal talks with IONS President Marilyn Mandala Schlitz about changes in allopathic health care and the wider acceptance of meditation, yoga, and consciousness in healing practices.

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With host and former IONS president James O'Dea, committed social change agent, Robert Gass, shares stories of his own personal and professional challenges and triumphs and the value of meditation and the application of noetic principles to shifting difficult situations from hopeless to life-affirming.

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This guided meditation was created by Cassandra Vieten as part of the Mindful Motherhood Project. It is one element of a three-part set of guided meditations intended especially for mothers and mothers soon to be, and readers of the book, Mindful Motherhood.

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During advanced meditative practices, unusual perceptions can arise including the sense of receiving information about unknown people who are deceased. As with meditation, this mental state of communication with the deceased involves calming mental chatter and becoming receptive to subtle feelings and sensations. Psychometric and brain electrophysiology data were collected from six individuals who had previously reported accurate information about deceased individuals under double-blind conditions.